Working With User-Generated Content

Visitors to your site can add their comments to any database item. This includes your own articles and blog posts, as well as links to other web sites, books, and anything else you put in the database. You can, of course, omit commenting if you choose.

Anti-Spam Measures

Every comment submitted is double-checked for spam, first with a robot-blocking technique and then using a third-party service called Akismet. If the comment gets a low “spaminess” score, then it is posted automatically. If it gets a high score, it is stored but is not published unless you review and approve it.

Messages sent via the contact form are checked in the same way. In addition, both the contact form and the comment form use other anti-bot coding measures to minimize the number of automated submissions you’ll have to deal with.

Reviewing Comments and Messages

To review all all of the pending comments, click Submissions > Comments. For each comment, you'll see whether or not it is currently considered to be spam. To accept a comment that has been blocked, click the thumbs-up; to mark a comment as spam, click the thumbs-down. Click the red x to delete a comment entirely, and the pencil to edit it.

You can also view comments related to a particular item in the database by click on the comment icon at the right side of the list page.

Contact Message Delivery

When a message is submitted on your site’s contact form, it is emailed to the address you used for the initial user account, assuming it passes the spam test.

You can change the email address, or even provide a list of email addresses (comma-separated) by editing the admin_contact_mail configuration setting on the Settings > Global Settings page.